Digital Transformation: A driver for better business results

Digital’ is a standard inclusion in much of media coverage today, especially in technology related features. Such a degree of attention is justified, as digital is indeed a phenomenon. Individuals, corporations and governments around the world are embracing the digital wave across all spheres of life, effectively transforming the way they approach their pursuits.

For the uninitiated, digital transformation revolves around the use of disruptive technologies to make fundamental changes to the way institutions operate, and creating transformational impact on products, services and processes. Businesses have come a long way, from the advent of the PC to being digital enterprises.

While the last decade of the 20th century saw the rise of the Internet, there was the dotcom bubble at the cusp of the new millennium. The new century saw the proliferation of mobile phones (and consequently mobile data) and witnessed the breaking of the proverbial fourth wall through the rise of social media. Over the last few years, the world has been abuzz with revolutionary concepts like cloud, big data, social for business, consumerization, Internet of Things among others.

Now this in itself will tell us about the incessant march towards digitalization of the global enterprise. SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) — the hottest topic of discussion today, is the underpinning of digital transformation. Both individuals and corporates are increasingly seeing the benefits of engaging with the community to not only share experiences but also find answers to problems. Similarly, mobile now offers a lot more than telephony, and lets us finish work as well.

People are not just consuming information but also generating a lot of it. Numbers are telling a story more than ever. People now want to access information from anywhere, with multiple devices. Sample this. The user base of Facebook exceeds Europe’s population; there are close to 7 billion mobile users globally, with India and China together accounting for more than 30 percent of the annual growth; and more than 50 percent of all workload is being processed on the cloud today. All this makes digital transformation more important than any of the previous industrial revolutions.